6700k / 970 underpreforming

[Shadow19231]

Hi, guys! Long time lurker, first time poster. I recently bought a pre-built computer over the holidays and I am frustrated with it's performance for Dolphin. Before I bought it i made sure the parts in it were going to preform well for specifically dolphin and steam games. The 6700k / 900 series was what i would have built manually, and i just saved myself the first time build problems that could have occurred.

I run the preformance guide with the following modifications:
3x IR
8x MSAA
16X AA

Now, To the best of my knowledge this is something that my hardware should be able to handle. I read countless lesser speed hardware running things much more demanding and it makes me flatout sad! I'm not sure what information to supply, but i would like advice from people who know much more than me.

What settings do you guys run on similar priced/preforming hardware?


Thank you for reading

[Helios]

Which games lag?

[Shadow19231]

I'm having trouble running: Timesplinters 2, NBA Street Vol 2, Crash bandicoot, believe it or not! Hehe. I'm not sure the spectrum between easy to run and very hard to run. It intially boggles my mind how super smash for the wii can be ran with the same settings i wrote, but crash bandicoot has frame drops for no apparent reason

[Link_to_the_past]

Do you have by any chance used 8xSSAA? Just for testing try disabling antialiasing. Also check in the nvidia control panel the gpu power settings, to be set in high performance to not fall into low power mode while running dolphin.

[Shadow19231]

(01-17-2016, 06:25 AM)Link_to_the_past Wrote: Do you have by any chance used 8xSSAA? Just for testing try disabling antialiasing. Also check in the nvidia control panel the gpu power settings, to be set in high performance to not fall into low power mode while running dolphin.

I originally had 8xSSAA, but i read up on it, and have since moved to 8xMSAA. I just set my global setting in NVIDIA to use max preformance. I genuinely had no idea that was an option! All I knew was to force the computer to always use my real graphics card, and not the cpu based one.

I did a test without AA or anisotropic filtering and an interesting result happened. The same building in Timesplinters gave me the same frame drop count that happened with my settings cranked.

I think with that realization i can determine it's not the hardware, but emulating this particular part of the game is just tough. As with the other games i listed, crash bandicoot only stuttered in certain high demand(?) spots. However, I cannot explain NBA Street, as it's a very consistant game in terms of it's demands.

Thank you for your quick support. I look forward to hearing from everyone

[mimimi]

Sounds a bit like shader cache generation. Everytime you update Dolphin, it needs to rebuild the shader cache for every single game situation. If it only stutters the 1st time in a level, but not the 2nd time, it's shader cache generation lag. You'd have to overclock your cpu to reduce it, but with the official builds, you can't eliminate it completely.

If it's not shader cache generation, you should try to find out what the bottleneck is. If you reduce IR to 1 and disable AA and AF, you can check if it's graphics related. But with a 970, i'd guess as long as you only use 3xIR, no AA and 16xAF, you are not running into a gpu bottleneck anywhere. Keep in mind that some graphics settings combinations increase the cpu requirements as well for some reason. Example is efb to ram(efb to texture only disabled) + high IR.

Last but not least, some settings are stupid, like LLE audio for a game, where HLE audio is completely fine. Or per pixel lightning.

[Shadow19231]

(01-17-2016, 07:23 AM)mimimi Wrote: Sounds a bit like shader cache generation. Everytime you update Dolphin, it needs to rebuild the shader cache for every single game situation. If it only stutters the 1st time in a level, but not the 2nd time, it's shader cache generation lag. You'd have to overclock your cpu to reduce it, but with the official builds, you can't eliminate it completely.

If it's not shader cache generation, you should try to find out what the bottleneck is. If you reduce IR to 1 and disable AA and AF, you can check if it's graphics related. But with a 970, i'd guess as long as you only use 3xIR, no AA and 16xAF, you are not running into a gpu bottleneck anywhere. Keep in mind that some graphics settings combinations increase the cpu requirements as well for some reason. Example is efb to ram(efb to texture only disabled) + high IR.

Last but not least, some settings are stupid, like LLE audio for a game, where HLE audio is completely fine. Or per pixel lightning.

How many hours do i need to put into timesplinter's multiplayer for it to properly record the shadow cache for maps that give me trouble? Some stats that i grabbed.. I noticed my CPU only reaches 25% with dolphin, skype, and a youtube video on a different monitor. My GPU was hitting 50% during Dolphin with the settings i listed. If i had to point the blame, i would put the finger at my GPU. The CPU is carrying the load, and the graphics card just won't give me what it can. *shrugs*

EDIT: I come to the GPU hate conclusion because the cpu by itself can render in any resolution supported by dolphin @ 60 frames. However, once i add AA or multi sampling, it goes to hell. *just wanted to make sure why i feel the way i do

[leolam]

(01-17-2016, 07:43 AM)Shadow19231 Wrote: I noticed my CPU only reaches 25% with dolphin, skype, and a youtube video on a different monitor.

Maybe you already know this, but Dolphin mostly uses two cores.

FAQ Wrote:Every core on a CPU runs in parallel. Two tasks can run very well in parallel if they don't need to communicate often or to run at the exact same speed. For example, compressing files can be run on separate cores because compressing one file and compressing another file are two completely independent tasks, which do not need to communicate.

In Dolphin, the only demanding tasks that can run well in parallel are the CPU, the GPU and the DSP. Breaking up any of these tasks into smaller tasks just to run it on more cores is very likely to make the program slower. That's why Dolphin only runs on 3 cores and won't use all of your 4 or 6 cores CPU.

(source)

With an i7 6700K, you have 8 threads. Dolphin uses 2, which means that your global CPU usage is around 2/8 = 1/4 = 25%.

(01-17-2016, 07:43 AM)Shadow19231 Wrote: My GPU was hitting 50% during Dolphin with the settings i listed. If i had to point the blame, i would put the finger at my GPU. The CPU is carrying the load, and the graphics card just won't give me what it can. *shrugs*

Unless you're using very high graphical settings and pushing your GPU to its limit, Dolphin will not use 100% of your GPU!

[Shadow19231]

(01-17-2016, 08:06 AM)leolam Wrote: Maybe you already know this, but Dolphin mostly uses two cores.
(source)

With an i7 6700K, you have 8 threads. Dolphin uses 2, which means that your global CPU usage is around 2/8 = 1/4 = 25%.


Unless you're using very high graphical settings and pushing your GPU to its limit, Dolphin will not use 100% of your GPU!

Well, that's exactly my problem. I'm asking my GPU to do things like 8xMSAA , etc, but it refuses to give me the power it's more than capable of. It gives me what it wants to, but it's certainly not giving me what it should (otherwise the graphics would be fine)

[leolam]

Is it always stuck on 50% even if you increase the settings even more?